need help! school requirement regarding psychiatric nursg...

Thunderwolf, MSN, RN · May 3, 2006

Moved to Nursing Student Assistance forum for better input from other students or instructors who may provide this type of information. Other students may have taken psych and may have had similar projects.

RENAISSANCE RN · May 3, 2006

Most hospitals have libraries for the public. I would go to one of theirs and use their research materials. The college should have one for you also. The areas you have are so broad. For example " what did you want to know about past drug hx." I highly suggest going and getting a nursing mental health text for this. You are going to need to site your work on your project and you wont be able to site us.

Good luck. I think Hospitals have the best libraries. Bring change because you will be copying pages.

Daytonite, BSN, RN · May 3, 2006

schizophrenia which is a psychosis is probably the most common of the psychiatric illnesses. here is information on schizophrenia and it's diagnosis to get you started

http://www.fpnotebook.com/psy224.htm and well as psychosis http://www.fpnotebook.com/psy220.htm which has more general information. at the left side of these web pages you will find other links to pages in the same site. you will notice there are links there under pharmacology with a number of commonly prescribed psychiatric drugs listed.

here is another page of links from medline plus about schizophrenia

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/schizophrenia.html

there is also information at this site on drugs

you can find information on specific drugs at this web site as well

www.drugs.com/

i'm guessing that it is the history of a patients mental status that you are needing information on. this site http://medicine.ucsd.edu/clinicalmed/mental.htm will link you to a page describing what to look for when doing a mental exam on a patient. these same items can be looked for and asked about when trying to get a psychiatric history about a patient. these are the components of any patient's history that a physician addresses:

chief complaint - in patient's own words
history of present illness
past medical history - past illnesses, injuries, hospitalizations, surgery, allergies, immunizations, substance abuse, diet, sleep patterns and current medication
family history
psychosocial history
review of systems

general

skin

head

eyes

ears

nose

mouth and throat

neck

chest

cardiac

vascular

breasts

gi

urinary

male genitalia

female genitalia

musculoskeletal

neurologic

the nursing care plan is developed from the patient information that you obtained by doing a history (all that stuff listed above). we call that data collection. as you are questioning the patient during the history, specific medical problems will usually become pretty clear to the nurse. those problems are the ones you will want to list on your nursing care plan. here in the u.s. we list them as nursing diagnoses. i don't know how you are expected to list them in the philippines. your nursing care plan will then have lists of strategies to help treat those problems. those are nursing interventions. nursing interventions often follow doctor's orders, but there are many things nurses can do independently of doctors. see the links in the family practice notebook that i gave you above for drug information. case management is part of what the nursing care plan is doing. with case management, however, you are also looking at all the areas of the patients life that he might need help with. so, you want to think about basics like medical care, money, housing, food, clothing, transportation. how will the patient get access to those things? as a case manager, how can you connect the patient to services or people who can help him get those things. in other words, you are looking at the overall picture of the patient's life, not just their medical problem when you are case managing.

is that a helpful start for you?

klara · May 5, 2006

thank you daytonite. I appreciate your help a lot. I'll be surfing those websites you gave me. Our teacher told me something about bipolar cases? i dont have any idea what it is. She says that topic is quite interesting.

Daytonite, BSN, RN · May 6, 2006

here is information to link into on bipolar disorder. bipolar refers to two opposite ends. in this case the two opposite ends are two totally opposite types of behavior exhibited by these people. they can be manic one minute and swing into a deep depression very quickly. the disorder has undergome some name changes these days and i'm not quite sure what the official term for this disorder is as of this day. when i was in nursing school it was called manic depression and i have a very clear recollection of a patient we had back in the late 1970's who had gone off his lithium (that's what was primarily given for this disorder at that time) on his own and was higher than a kite, in a manic phase. i worked nights and for 3 nights he got not one wink of sleep and was quite entertaining telling us he was a real estate agent and had newspapers spread out all over his bed reading the real estate ads. he was also quite charming. this is sometimes typical of bipolars. however, they restarted him on his lithium and as it started to kick in, he became a normal behaving person again and finally started sleeping at night. we learned from the day shift nurses that he was an unemployed real estate agent and not the active real estate agent he had led us on the night shift to believe. nowadays, they don't keep people in the hospital as long as they did back then so most people don't get to spend as much time with someone who is bipolar to observe manic or depressive behavior swings like this unless they live with someone who has the disorder. my older brother's second wife was bipolar and when she was in manic phases was loud and what we would call the "life of the party". however, she also had swings into depression that were awful and she attempted suicide twice. this is very typical of bipolars who do not take or stay on any medication to control the mood swings.

http://www.fpnotebook.com/psy26.htm

http://www.merck.com/mrkshared/cvmhighlight?file=/mrkshared/mmanual/section15/chapter189/189d.jsp%3fregion%3dmerckcom&word=bipolar&word=disorder&domain=www.merck.com#hl_anchor

http://search.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/query?disambiguation=true&function=search&server2=server2&server1=server1&parameter=bipolar+disorder&x=77&y=14 - a search of bipolar disorder on medline plus returned this page of links. i'll let you explore them.